Read Online All the Lives He Led-A Novel by Frederik Pohl - Free Book Online Page B

group that came along, like the ones who called themselves L’Esercito Nuovo del Risorgimento, whatever that meant, and to further their objectives, whatever those might have been, firebombed the Ponte Vecchio in Florence one Saturday morning. That was a shock for the Italians. Even the Nazis hadn’t touched the Ponte Vecchio, back in WWII days when the retreating German army was pulverizing just about everything else it left behind. In Florence they had merely demolished all the buildings for four or five blocks on either side. So it was the law that every Italian resident, citizen or not, had to put in one hour a week on training to resist terrorism.
    Of course nobody really could do much that was useful about resisting it. But there were motions to go through, so we went through them.
    The sessions weren’t really all that bad. Oh, numbingly dull, sure, but they were something I could be doing with other people. Some of them were almost friendly. Well, noncommittal, anyway. There was Abukar Abdu, from some little town somewhere in Africa. And of course my chess and general conversation pal, Maury Tesch. There was a good-looking, dark-haired woman named Elfreda Something-or-other whom I might have had some faint hopes for if she hadn’t been hanging on the arm of a large, Italian-looking guy I’d never seen before. There was also another Italian, this one named Vespasiano Gatti, who, it turned out, wasn’t friendly at all. In fact he didn’t like me even as much as the average other person.
    Gatti made that clear one night when I spotted an empty seat next to him and sat down in it. He gave me one look—a really nasty look—and then he got up and crossed to the other side of the room. Why that was I had no idea. Gatti was middle-aged, or maybe a little more than that, and at first I thought he was too rich to be an Indentured because he carried a silver-handled cane and wore an old-fashioned three-piece suit made out of expensive cream-colored flannel. But then I got a better look. His cuffs were frayed and the ferrule of his silver-handled cane had been broken off and lost. He was at most a formerly rich man. Not unlike my dad.
    A nice touch with the antiterrorism classes was that our teacher passed out little cups of espresso and those rock-hard things they call biscotti that I didn’t care much for but appreciated the thought of. The person who provided the biscotti was our instructor, an old fart named Professor, or sometimes Colonel-Professor, Bartolomeo Mazzini. When I say “old” what I mean is really old. That is, about as old as an old man can get, with a bumpy old skull as bare as a baby’s bottom. Mazzini hadn’t even bothered to get his hair reseeded or to remove the wrinkles in his face or in fact to do any of the things that everybody else in the world did to keep on looking respectably young. When I came in early one evening he was sound asleep at his desk, and when the rest of the class got there and woke him up he stared around at us as though he wondered who we were and what we were doing there.
    He didn’t seem like a totally bad guy, though. Once all the coffee cups and cookies got handed out he would turn on the wall screens and show us everything that was going on, terrorist-wise. Like firebombing department stores and butcher shops in Argentina, which, he told us, was probably a push of native Indians trying to get the European Argentinians to go back home. But, he said cheerfully, we probably didn’t have to worry about it spreading to Pompeii, or actually anywhere off the Argentine pampas, because already a couple of thousand Argentine and UN troops were systematically deploying rockets and artillery to pulverize a little town across the river in Uruguay because that was where the ringleaders of the terrorists had unwisely assembled.
    Old Bart filled us in on stuff like that for ten or fifteen minutes in that first session I went to. Then he showed us pictures of a bunch of